Hello!
Just by way of introduction, I am a monolingual English person living in the UK. I am married to a British Sri Lankan, she doesn't speak sinhala but can get the jist (so she can't teach me directly). Her parents are both native to Sri Lanka and have lived in the UK since the late 70's (but they didn't teach her so, not sure they can teach me but will be useful conversation partners).
I've always wanted to learn another language and now that me and my wife have a son (he's 2) I have a particular motivation to want to learn Sinhala. My ultimate goal is to become fluent in the spoken language so that I can teach my son. I want to make sure that whilst he may be British born he will still have a strong connection back to his Sri Lankan side of his culture.
I've purchased the lazy but smart sinhala premium courses, and made a bunch of flashcards on Anki in addition to having a Utalk subscription.I also have a tutor on italki - many of the classes tend to be rote repition and whilst I have been making progress, and I like my tutor, it feels pretty slow and limited.
Many of the leading language experts reccomend learning through comprehensible input. The emphasis is not on speaking the language but of developing an understanding in a natural way (similar to infants) and the actual talking will come later naturally. After all when we first learn a language we don't learn by studying the grammar, we hear our parents and other natives speak the language and learn through context. So at it's core with the natural language learning method you learn via listening to TV ( i.e. with subtitles in Sinahala) , native speakers, radio, and above all (according to some) reading the target language (sinhala).
One challenge I can see with trying to apply this approach to Sinhala is that I have heard the spoken and written languages are significantly different which as far as I understand is uncommon in most languages. I brought this up to one of the YouTubers and was met with a pretty ignorant response of "I don't know about Sinhala but I am sure that's not the case".
I have a very rudimentary understanding of the script, but without the reading (a major source of comprehensible input) I feel a bit lost, I sense it might be useful for the subtitles but I don't seem to be able to find any media like that.
So I guess I have a few questions;
- Does my understanding that the spoken and written languages are so meaningfully different that it is essentially unproductive to go this route if understanding the spoken language is my goal?
- Does anyone have any recommendations of Sri Lankan (or dubbed international shows into Sinhala) TV shows that I could access online ( I have a VPN so that should help me get around any restrictions)?
- is anyone else here a non-native speaker of Sinhala who has developed fluency and if so - how did you approach the process?
- Are there any discords or similar that would be useful for me to join
Thank you in advance (Bohoma istutii) to anyone who can help.
[link] [comments]
from Language Learning https://ift.tt/cCLj8Mo
via Learn Online English Speaking
Comments
Post a Comment